1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to lottery systems for conducting lottery games and casino gaming systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to lottery games that use letter-based puzzles.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many governments and/or gaming organizations sponsor wagering games known as lotteries. A typical lottery game entails players selecting permutations or combinations of numbers. This is followed by a “draw,” wherein the lottery randomly selects a combination or permutation of numbers, typically drawn from a series of numbered balls. Prizes are awarded based on the number of matches between a player's selected numbers and the drawn numbers. Such are the well-publicized, multi-million-dollar-jackpot lotteries that are popular throughout the world.
Lotteries have become an important source of income to governments to alleviate the financial burden for education and other governmental programs. As lotteries have become more ubiquitous and governments have grown more dependent on them, it has become a challenge to sustain public interest. One approach to invigorating lottery sales is to expand game content beyond traditional combination/permutation games: fresh, sophisticated, entertaining games. New games may help keep current players as well as draw new players.
In the pursuit of new lottery games, certain goals must be met. The lottery must be able to control the payout to the player. Ideally, the payout should be the same for all players regardless of skill. Short of that, the expected payout should fall within a range, i.e., there is an acceptable lower and upper bound to the expected player payout.
One potential area for new lottery games is word games. However, it is problematic to incorporate the characteristics of words into a lottery game in a meaningful way. Language is complex and idiosyncratic and letters do not occur uniformly in words (e.g. the letter ‘E’ occurs in more words than ‘Q’). Such erratic characteristics do not easily lend themselves to lottery games in which probabilities and payouts must be tightly controlled.